@coffeejerk

You're making a novel argument that because numbers aren't perfect, they're meaningless. You should publish your hypothesis in a journal for statisticians.

"Equalitarian" (not "egalitarian") is sometimes used in the sciences to refer to people who go to great lengths to claim that "undesirable" numbers are meaningless, because otherwise some people would feel bad.

For example, equalitarians might claim that bribery and the arrest of journalists aren't more common in some countries than others.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Endemic also to Michael Chabon novels. ;-)

A deep constitutional scholar such as yourself probably already knows this:

"For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.

Enter the modern National Rifle Association. Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety. But a coup d’état at the group’s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power—as part of the leading edge of the new, more rightward-leaning Republican Party. (Jill Lepore recounted this history in a recent piece for The New Yorker.) The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as “a fraud.”"

source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/12/jeffrey-toobin-second-amendment.html

@dystopianfutetoday
excellent question and is exactly where the discussion should be.

understand i am not against regulations i.e:background checks,licenses etc etc
i also think a gun safety course should be mandatory.responsible gun safety is just being a good citizen and neighbor.

have a mental illness with a record of violence? sorry.no guns for you.
convicted of a violent crime? no guns for you either.
but these regulations are already in place and responsible gun owners are..well...responsible.

so where is the argument REALLY centered?
unregulated .or more accurately put: weakly regulated gun shows and who benefits from these gun shows? gun manufacturers.
and where do they get their political clout? NRA.where those who are already blocked from gun purchase can skirt the system and the NRA can hide behind the second amendment.

that sound like a fairly accurate assesment?

now..onto your direct question on the downside of only the police and military being armed.
simply put: i do not trust authority or to be more precise,i do not trust power because power begets more power and seeks only to retain its own power which will always lead to you losing your power of self determination in the end.

america was never designed to have a standing army and their are articles that espouse the ending of the republic if we tried.here we are going on 60 years with a standing army.how is that working out for us?

bush had his illegal wars and surveillence and obama has his assasinations.

the police,which was born from the old town sheriffs were put in place to enforce this new and noble idea america had "all equal under law".a local citizenry trained to enforce the law and protect this "property ownership" another new and novel approach to society.

what do we have now?
defense money being spent on SWAT teams who now have high powered assault weapons and tanks...TANKS!..FFS.

do i really have to make a list?
waco
ruby ridge
the list is not short.

do you see where i am going with this?
i am not speaking about right and wrong.
i am pointing to the hypocrisy.
this is about elementary morality.
i totally agree with you that violence begets violence but if we are going to take away peoples right to own guns then we need to take them away from the police as well.

because just as some seriously damaged people have wrought death and suffering,so to has our very own government officials.
having the power of the government behind their actions does NOT make it more morally acceptable.

on a personal note i find the politicizing of the sandy hook school shooting so fucking despicable and grotesque that i literally shake with rage.this goes out to both sides of this political whoring.
the NRA can go fuck itself with a dirty razor-bladed dildo and the tree-hugging,pussified everybody-wants-to-bugger-my-lil-jonny scaredy cats can go fuck off as well.

i do not carry a gun nor am i interesting in owning one but i will fight for your right to own one.they are a weapon and as such should be monitored and regulated,but they should not be banned due to a giant fear storm and an over-abundance of "what if" pontificating.

who wants to live in a minority report world?not me.
most gun owners are responsible.
most police are good at what they do.
do not let the statistics arguments allow you to give up more of your rights.

but if we are going to protest i will be there with not a single weapon on me.

Yeah, sorry. Three or four lights. Our container was like... 2x2x4 inches or so, maybe? The bottom face was square, and then it was twice or more taller than that, anyway. So we'd usually get one light about a half inch or an inch from the bottom, but centered with respect to the square side, then another one roughly in the *actual* middle of the water, then another one close to the surface. And then, the weird one was that we'd get a fourth close to one of the upper corners.

The middle and bottom ones were pretty consistent. Wouldn't always get the other two. And I might actually be misremembering getting the top center one. We were using a kinda novel way to measure the spectrum to measure the temperature of it. If we'd put a little more work in, it probably would've been a publishable result. But, lazy-ass undergrads.

The progress in Big Dogs development is awesome.
One of the main characters in my work in progress Sci-Fi novel is an ancestor of this bad boy.

http://gryphonboy.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/argentum/

This is really cool to hear about. Thanks for telling us about this. Maybe a biographical novel is in your future?

I went to a psychologist a long time ago and she wrote a novel about me, I mean a novel about me for my parents. In it she said I was introverted and scatter brained.

Sometimes I wonder what impact that had on how I grew as a young adult. Maybe she should have just kept her thoughts to herself and said instead, he is defiant and has a bad attitude towards authority as displayed in many kids his age.

I have a feeling that there isn't going to be much of a line. In fact, waiting in line sucks...definitely not a part of my heaven. Hell, yes...but that's par-for-the-course.>> ^Xaielao:

I'm waiting for the rapture even though I don't believe and know it's based on a novel, just so when these guys try to cross into heaven, Jesus can stand there and go 'Ok next? Woh woh.. no you guys are supposed to be in the 'other' line'.

I'm waiting for the rapture even though I don't believe and know it's based on a novel, just so when these guys try to cross into heaven, Jesus can stand there and go 'Ok next? Woh woh.. no you guys are supposed to be in the 'other' line'.

Anyone else thinks that World War Z was a bad book?
For me, Brooks tries to give a serious global perspective of a zombie apocalypse, but his portrayal of different cultures and real world geopolitical forces falls flat.
I know it's pointless complaining about a lack of realism in a novel about zombies, but it ruins my immersion when the author seems to get his impression of the world from American news and the Karate Kid.

>> ^Norsuelefantti:

So soon USA will become a cult nation? Can't wait.


Trips me out that it took someone besides the submitter and 2 days to add this to the cult channel. Mormonism is about as glaring an example of a cult as any of them. Others you may have heard of....
Scientology
Jehovah's Witnesses
Church Universal and Triumphant
Moonies
Raëlism
Christian Scientists
Unification Church...and a shitpot full of others including some fringe militant polygamists with their heads up to their red necks up each other's asses.
It's a brave new world, William Gibson fans get ready because he pretty much nailed with every novel possible scenarios for soon-to-be Planet E, and whack religions factor way in.
Personally, I'd love to have al...er, some of you, members of my church someday

I thought the following factoid was cool as shit~

"Bill Finger and I created the Joker. Bill was the writer. Jerry Robinson came to me with a playing card of the Joker. That's the way I sum it up. [The Joker] looks like Conrad Veidt — you know, the actor in The Man Who Laughs, [the 1928 movie based on the novel] by Victor Hugo. [...] Bill Finger had a book with a photograph of Conrad Veidt and showed it to me and said, 'Here's the Joker'. Jerry Robinson had absolutely nothing to do with it, but he'll always say he created it till he dies. He brought in a playing card, which we used for a couple of issues for him [the Joker] to use as his playing card" ~ Bob Kane Interviewed by Frank Lovece for Entertainment Weekly, 1994. Perkowski grabbed the footage from that very flick to create his joker character for this nod to the caped crusader.

Better than Batman Returns and Forever combined iffn ya axe me!

before watching, gonna take the quiz according to the title:

Cops and what they do.
Lawyers and what they do.
Doctors and what they do.
Criminals and what they do (see cops and what they do).
Airhead roommates (one or all might be gay) and what they do.
Any number of horrifying reality situations with "real" people ~ Otherwise known as Voyeurism.
Any scenario having to do with some bullshit, stylized intelligence organization.
Shows like "Lost" that piss you off and make you wish they would make more big-budget Sci-Fi films based on best-selling novels.

That's 8-Lesse how I did....

>> ^Deano:

>> ^kymbos:
Am I the only person who does not give a shit?

It's a human being doing something incredible and breaking boundaries. Isn't that worth something?
What if this had happened before the Columbia disaster and the data about how you can bail out in the upper atmosphere had been used to save those lives (i.e they bailed out just before the ship tore apart)?
I think it's a wonderful and worthy stunt and funded out of all those Red Bull drinks


No, it's a stupid advertising gimmick. It isn't science or new or even interesting. It's been done and proven. USAF did exactly this in 1960. This just added a few hundred feet to their altitude. Russian probably did it sooner.

So no it's not a human breaking any boundaries or any thing novel. It is just advertising paid for by product sales. No different from a TV commercial expect it tricked you into talking about their product.